Reading Rambo

The Paper Magician  by Charlie N. Holmberg (a lady!) caught my eye a while back because of its cover. I mean...lookit that It also has a lady in a late 1800s dress AND she's holding an umbrella, which usually specifies whimsy of some kind? I don't know. Also paper in what way! Is SHE paper? I have questions. So it turns out magic in this 1890s/1900s world seems pretty accepted? And there's a school, and Ceony Twill, the whimsically named heroine (ah, that's why that umbrella's there) has just graduated from said school and she has to bond to a material because that is how magic works here, do not question it.  But she gets assigned to paper  because no one chooses paper because it is stupid. Why would you choose paper when you could work with metal (she wants to work with metal). But there she is, so she goes to the home of her new instructor guy whose apprentice she'll be. And the guy (Magician or "Mg." Thane) turns out to be like 30 and o...

In 2015, my delightful friend who was then at Little, Brown sent me their upcoming book The Witches: Salem, 1692  by Stacy Schiff. It was an excellent book to brag about having. Did I read it? Of course not. I was busy making binders for my upcoming Cahokia Mounds trip and also sitting around a lot. But every October! I have looked over at the giant tome that is The Witches  and thought 'Maybe this year?' But I have invariably become distracted and left it alone, of course losing interest in November because witches are for October . And also other times if you're interested in them/are one/like Roald Dahl books or Practical Magic . Or just really like the Monty Python take on it. I'm about 70 pages into the 400+ page nonfiction breakdown of the 1692 events in Salem, Massachusetts, and can I say — well done. I mean, hot damn, Stacy Schiff. I'm not sure how you got over 400 pages out of something we don't really have great records of, but you also wr...

Everyone was reading it. So I decided to read it. It didn't pan out well for The Help , but it was perfectly fine for Girl on the Train . But When Dimple Met Rishi ? For those unaware, When Dimple Met Rishi  is a YA novel about an 18-year-old Indian-American girl named Dimple who's just graduated, is going to Stanford in the fall, and really wants to go to a summer coding program called Insomnia Con so she can create an app, meet her idol and BEGIN HER LIFE OF CODING. I was super on board at this point. She also has an overbearing mother who she thinks wants to see her married and with a family immediately. Dimple never wears makeup, is very open about her opinions, has wild hair (the book keeps coming back to these points), and is very anti-the marriage thing. What she does NOT know is her parents are letting her go to Insomnia Con because they have set her up with Rishi, the son of their friends. Rishi knows this, though, and boy, do hijinks ensue. HERE I...

OKAY. I love the Inhumans. For those unaware, they're a part of Marvel's ever-expanding universe of ridiculous proportions. They live on an island called Attilan where EVERYTHING IS COOL except they maybe have a slave race? Unclear. I was introduced to Medusa in Ms Marvel where I was like who is this lady with amazing hair and why does she live on a separate island with this giant dog . So I checked this out. The ISSUE with Inhumans by Paul Jenkins is it kind of assumes you already know a lot of shit about the Inhumans. Here's what I learned from this book: 1. Black Bolt is the shit. He also can't speak, FOR THIS SMALLEST WHISPER WOULD CLEAVE WORLDS IN TWAIN. 2. Medusa is his wife. Her hair has the strength of steel? And she can manipulate it psychically to like...ensnare people. I don't get why this makes her queen of the Inhumans, but her hair does  look pretty great. 3. Kid Inhumans wait for their powers to go through some metamorphosis thing, and t...

I talked about this book for a WEEK after I read it. Slider  called to me from the floor of BookExpo back in June. The cover's eye-catchingly great and 100% the reason I stuffed it in my overly-full tote. Once BookExpo is over, I usually go through and see what I just grabbed in a frenzy of bookmadness and what I genuinely want. After reading the first couple pages and checking out the excellent writing, Slider  stayed in the keep pile. It's about a high school freshman named David who's really really good at eating. Eating contests are his passion. He has heroes in that community, and one of those heroes just lost a contest by half a hot dog. Someone's selling it on BuyBuy (basically eBay) for 50 cents, so David "borrows" his mom's credit card and bids on it with a max bid of 20 dollars. Only he accidentally put $2,000  and now he's a 14-year-old with no job who has to find $2,000. To pay for half a hot dog. I don't know about you guys...

American Eclipse, the nonfiction book by David Baron about the 1878 solar eclipse, was published just this summer in anticipation of the August 21st solar eclipse that will be visible across the middle of America, cutting a horizontal swath across the country, lingering longest in Illinois (yes, of course I'm proud of this) and being most fully visible in what looks like Kentucky and Indiana. The book's subtitle is "A Nation's Epic Race to Catch the Shadow of the Moon and Win the Glory of the World." So that's fun. It's really  readable, and I say that as someone who thought The Martian  was way too damn sciencey. Baron keeps skirting the edges of my interest but does not go over the cliff into the pits of Too Much Science Don't Care. Because he also talks about humans! I love humans! The main humans involved here are University of Michigan astronomer James Craig Watson, Vassar astronomer and comet-discoverer Maria Mitchell, and then Thom...

We are in the middle of the Sixth Extinction. Also known as the Anthropocene period, or Age of Humans. "Age of Humans" sounds grand, but it's less us being the center of it all and more us mucking up everything we touch. But don't worry! We've literally been doing it ever since we began existing! The Sixth Extinction  picks one type of going-extinct creature/plant per chapter, and journalist Elizabeth Kolbert chronicles the history of extinction as a concept, while explaining how we are in the middle of the sixth mass extinction event on Earth that we know of. Exciting, terrifying times. I put off reading this for quite some time, because I thought it would just depress me. Strangely enough, it made it all seem kind of...normal. All while Kolbert and the scientists she interviews stress that this is very very not normal. Our oceans are being acidified, our global temperatures are rising, and we are almost OUT of Sumatran rhinos. But I did come out of...

"Everything weird started the day my dad brought home the yurt" is how Who's That Girl , a YA music-filled novel, begins. First, a thing: this book was written by my brilliant friend Blair Thornburgh, editor at Quirk, author of this viral post about medieval Christmas carols , and one of the only people who shares with me a deep love for singer/songwriter/owner-of-many-scarves Loreena McKennitt. This is mainly being noted because my normal jam is nonfiction about the 19th century, so this might seem a little out of scope. NOW. I mean, it starts with a yurt. That's already +500 points.  Who's That Girl  is an excellent blend of nerdery, throwback feelings of being a teenager, and queerness. No, the main character isn't queer, but she's a member of her school's version of what back in the day was the GSA (Gay-Straight Alliance) and here is the extremely-long-and-therefore-accurately-acronymed OWPALGBTQIA.  The main character, Nattie (aka Natali...

Daphne Du Maurier's 1951  My Cousin Rachel  prompts the age-old question: what if you were a young dumb dumb with an estate in Cornwall who is convinced your charming, thoughtful, and recently-widowed cousin Rachel wants to abandon her native Italy forever and live with you, your dogs, and your elderly butler in a damp house by the sea. AFTER ALL WHO WOULDN'T. Also she's a widow because she'd married your uncle who raised you who then recently died, so also this has just become the MOST oedipal and makes everyone feel gross thinking about it. Said dumb dumb is Philip Ashley, who is 24 and aptly referred to in the recent film version as a "glorious puppy." He is so  excited about some things. And so  sulky about so many other things. He's our narrator, which here means he is our misogynistic, xenophobic lens through which to view all events. His uncle died in Italy soon after marrying Rachel. Said uncle suspected he was being poisoned. He also p...

Y'know when your life is falling apart because your husband is the head of an omnipotent technology company and you feel disconnected from humanity and all you want to do is live in a trailer park and bang a drifter? Then you will SUPER RELATE to Alissa Nutting's Made for Love , aka That Book With the Airbrushed Dolphin Cover. I like to think of this cover choice as "bold." Partially because it reminds me of my second grade Lisa Frank folders and partially because, similar to her previous book Tampa , it's another "hide the cover on the El" book. But for a DIFFERENT reason. I have a paperback galley of it, but I'll bet the juxtaposition of this airbrushed dolphin scene with the niceness of a hardcover is interesting . When first encountering this book, I did in fact wrinkle my nose at the fact the author wrote Tampa . "Oh, the sex book," I said. I'd like to point out I never read   Tampa, but I most definitely associate it with ...

I took a break from life to read some sweet sweet fiction. Holly Black's The Coldest Girl in Coldtown  is about a world where--VAMPIRES! VAMPIRES EVERYWHERE! Except more specifically in Coldtowns, which are like big walled in areas where they keep the vampires. Only they haven't caught all  of them, so you still have to take precautions in normal life or you could get bitten and then infected and then you either have to sweat it out for 88 days and somehow not drink human blood, OR, you go to Coldtown.  ALL ROADS LEAD TO COLDTOWN. So the main character is Tana and she's 17 and she wakes up the next morning after a party and all her friends are dead. That is the BEGINNING. She finds her ex-boyfriend still alive in a room, but bitten, oh and there's also a vampire chained up in there. But said vampire warns her that the other vampires are calling from inside the house  so she's like "oh shit" and they all get outta there. But who is...

Yeah, I read The Girl on the Train well after everyone else, but now I've done it, so I am part of the cultural zeitgeist. This is Gone Girl all over again. And in so many ways! First off: missing or harmed girl lit. What's going on with that. What in our culture is prompting it. I HAVE MANY QUESTIONS. I get that missing girls have pretty much always been fascinating (see Erzsebet Bathory), but we're going through A Thing with them now, I am 99% sure, and it Means Something, but I do not yet know what. I'll give that a think later on So, Girl on the Train plot: Lady whose life has fallen apart daydreams about a couple she sees when the train she takes every day passes their house. One day the girl-half of the couple goes missing. Fallen Apart Life Lady decides to insert herself into the investigation because WHY NOT. The perspective switches characters every now then, because that is So Hot Right Now. I have no idea how some of these types of ...

WHAT AN APT TITLE FOR OUR TIMES A book about archaeologists! ("why does this matter," she said, curled in a ball in the corner) Bop around the world with Marilyn Johnson! ("nothing matters now") See what being an archaeologist in the 21st century is REALLY all about! ("aagghhhhhhhhhh") Take your everyday-life escapisms where you can get them, my friends. This is our new reality. And it sucks donkeyballs. But here we are. And I read a book I rated 3/5 stars on Goodreads! Lives in Ruins: Archaeologists and the Seductive Lure of Human Rubble  is by Marilyn Johnson, author of that book you probably saw at the bookstore a few years ago where she talked about how librarians would save the world. WELL WHERE ARE YOU NOW, LIBRARIANS. Anyway. Johnson's thing seems to be deciding to find out more about an interesting job and then going around and interviewing people who do that job in a variety of ways. Here she picked archaeology, which is...